This decade has brought some extraordinary shifts in the way films are made, and the way we watch them. But it’s not always easy to pinpoint exactly when those changes began – or where they will end. Many of the best films on this list – long-gestating triumphs such as In the Mood for Love or Spirited Away – were in development in the Nineties; others, now in production, will only see the light of day in a few years time. More than that, some of the key trends of the past 10 years – the DVD boom, faster broadband, YouTube – mean that today’s film fans have been watching, legally or illegally, movies from a bygone age. A fragmented, pick’n’mix cinematic culture, represented on this list by highly referential films such as Kill Bill, Moulin Rouge! and Far from Heaven, is increasingly the norm, not the exception.

Big studios have continued to focus on blockbusters and franchise-fare to boost their profits. This hasn’t always been bad – the Bourne and Lord of the Rings trilogies are terrific fun – but it’s striking that artistically successful, award-winning features such as There Will Be Blood and Milk have under-performed at the box office: how sombre they must seem to audiences weaned on Pirates of the Caribbean and Spider-Man. How CGI-depleted! How zombie-less!

Documentaries – intimate (Être et Avoir), epic (the nine-hour West of the Tracks) and idiosyncratic (The Gleaners and I) – have flourished, in part because of cheap digital technology, but also because that genre is given increasingly short-shrift on television. Animation – from the reliable Pixar stable to the Israeli Waltz with Bashir – has moved mainstream.

The independent sector has become more international with the rise of Mexican drama, Korean horror, Romanian social realism. The succès d’estime of Steve McQueen’s Hunger and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady bodes well for the future of art film. Cinema, claimed by many to be moribund at the end of the Nineties, is still hungry, furious and vital.

Tony Gilroy, 2007, £8.80: In this intelligent, literate thriller, George Clooney, as a disillusioned fixer at a New York law firm, did his best acting work to date, proving that he’s a movie star for the ages.

94 The Brown Bunny

Vincent Gallo, 2003 , £7.82: Heckled at Cannes, the decade’s most reviled film is now destined to become a future lost classic.

93 Grizzly Man

Werner Herzog, 2005 , £8.80: Still fierce, still idiosyncratic, the German director’s superb documentary about two slain bear enthusiasts was riveting from first to last.

92 The Wrestler

Darren Aronofsky, 2008 , £12.72: Comeback of the decade from Mickey Rourke, in a lacerating saga of steroid overkill and trailer-trash redemption.

91 Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner

Zacharias Kunuk, 2001, £12.72: This Inuit epic with extraordinary snow chases, based on a tale 2,000 years old, was a unique achievement that lingers.

90 Bend It Like Beckham

Gurinder Chadha, 2002, £8.80: A surprise British global hit, blending football with teen-girl comedy and cultural diversity issues. The launch pad for Keira Knightley, one of the decade’s biggest stars.

Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001, dvd n/a: A stirring fusion of masala music and anti-colonial cricketing epic that opened many eyes to Bollywood.

50 Russian Ark

Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002, £9.78: Technically spellbinding, the film comprised one tracking shot through Russia’s State Hemitage Museum. The result is an extraordinary meditation on history and identity.

Stephen Frears, 2006, £8.80: Helen Mirren’s astonishing portrayal of Elizabeth II in the week after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales helped make screenwriter Peter Morgan a name to reckon with.

27 Star Trek

JJ Abrams, 2009, £19.56: Who would have guessed that this wheezy old franchise could be freshened up by a cast of unknowns?

26 Être et Avoir

Nicolas Philibert, 2002, £9.78: A documentary about a devoted schoolteacher in rural France was heart-warming in both its subject matter and its word-of-mouth success.

25 Up

Pete docter, 2009, DVD n/a: This wondrous animated Pixar fable about an old man who ties balloons to his house and drifts off to South America had more emotional truth and depth than almost any film this year.

24 The Gleaners and I

AgnÈs Varda, 2000, dvd n/a: Funny, melancholic and deeply political, Varda’s digital cine-essay about social outsiders scouring the French countryside for food has been quietly influencing young filmmakers all decade.

23 Shaun of the Dead

Edgar Wright, 2004, £9.78: There were lots of zombie films this decade, but only this super-smart, suburban updating of a once-tired genre featured gags about Eighties electro.

Phyllida Lloyd, 2008, £15.65: This cheerful version of Abba’s greatest hits became the highest-grossing British movie of all time. Indifferently sung, clumsily directed – but for millions of people, it was a grand night out.

17 4 Months, 3 weeks, and 2 days

Cristian Mungiu, 2007, £9.78: Romanian cinema was a powerhouse in the second half of the decade; this gripping drama about abortion and female friendship was a standout.

Richard Linklater, 2004, £9.78: Before Sunrise’s Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reunited for a dream-parade through Parisian boulevards in the decade’s most gorgeous and affectingly romantic film.

14 Saw

James Wan, 2004, £9.78: The decade of Abu Ghraib found its cinematic equivalent in the torture porn aesthetics of this and the Hostel series.

13 West of the Tracks

Wang Bing, 2003, DVD n/a: Nine hours long with not a minute wasted, this portrait of a dying industrial district in China is a towering, epoch-defining masterpiece.

12 Amelie

Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001, £9.78: France’s biggest-ever global hit – an idealised view of Paris, and a star vehicle for Audrey Tautou as a young do-gooder. Its droll tone and tricksy style almost mask its heroine’s solitude and tristesse.

Danny Boyle, 2008, £12.72: Frenetic, savage but sentimental account of a young Mumbai man’s surprising success in a TV quiz show. A worldwide hit, its generosity of spirit and insistence on telling its story through Indian, not Western eyes, seemed to chime with new, tolerant attitudes to otherness, coinciding with the ascent of Barack Obama.

9 The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson, 2004, £9.78: Mel Gibson’s reputation has been tarred by anti-Jewish outbursts. Nothing, though, should take away from this phenomenal work of outsider art, a neo-avant-garde exercise in bodyshock violence that features an unknown cast and dialogue in Latin and Aramaic.Self-financed, and distributed to demographics normally beyond Hollywood’s reach, this reinvented the Bible for a torture-porn generation.

8 Amores Perros

Alejandro GonzÁlez I—Árritu, 2000, £9.78: Visceral, thrilling, operatic story set in Mexico City, with three colliding plots – all of which feature dogs. It made influential screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga a name to conjure with, and kick-started a series of audacious films by Mexican directors that dominated non-Anglophone films throughout the decade.

7 Borat

Larry Charles, 2006, £9.78: Is nice! Perturbing the world in a green Lycra thong, and parlaying this into unbeatable word-of-mouth, Sacha Baron Cohen’s mock-doc sensation overcame minimal pre-existing brand recognition to gross more than $250 million worldwide, and might just have defined US-Kazakhstan relations for all time.

6 Memento

Christopher Nolan, 2000, £17.60: Christopher Nolan could write the rulebook for how to emerge, in no time, as a world-class director. The model indie breakthrough, a fractured thriller, had all the ingredients to wow. Its time-splicing script, in particular, has proven more influential than any other for a new generation of screenwriters.

5 Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring

Peter Jackson, 2001, £9.78: If there was one franchise to rule them all, it was surely this. A hugely risky commitment for its studio, the outlay paid off more than anyone could have dreamed. It’s the enduring quality of the first instalment, leading us by the hand into Tolkien’s richly imagined world, that made our collective Hobbit-love possible.

4 There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas anderson, 2007, £10.76: It kick-started a catchphrase: “I drink your milkshake!” It featured the greatest performance of Daniel Day-Lewis’s already illustrious career. Its score – by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood – was hugely distinctive. P?? T Anderson’s epic about the birth of America’s obsession with oil was as ruggedly individual, frontier-pushing and darkly magnificent, as its subject matter.

3 The Incredibles

Brad Bird, 2004, £12.72:The revolution in digital cartoons had the same clear leader this decade that it did in the Nineties. No one, not even a smelly green ogre, could touch Pixar, who hit the peak of their miraculous creative streak with this dazzling caper about a superficially ordinary American family… with secret superpowers.

2 Brokeback Mountain

Ang Lee, 2005, £9.78: Director Ang Lee insists on calling this simply “a love story” but it broke new ground as a gay cowboy movie. Achingly moving, with career-high performances from Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as the strong, silent, repressed lead characters. A stunning achievement, brilliantly executed, with an acute sense of time and location.

1 Fahrenheit 9/11

Michael Moore, 2004, £8.80: It may not have been the best film of the decade. It may not have been the best film Moore has made (that honour still belongs to 1989’s Roger and Me). Nevertheless, it’s hard to overstate the importance of this film, a modestly funded political documentary that was shunned by its Disney backers but went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, coin more than $220 million around the world, and boost the emergence of politically liberal, agenda-driven multiplex fare such as Supersize Me and An Inconvenient Truth.

A speculation: might the accessible and populist fashion in which it marshalled its denunciation of George Bush’s 2000 “electoral theft”, to say nothing of the scorn it poured on American neo-conservative support for the “War on Terror”, have helped create or at least re-identify a large chunk of the non-traditional constituencies who were later tapped successfully by the Obama campaign team?

Criticism that Moore played fast and loose with his facts misses the point. He’s an old-fashioned circus barker. He trades in passion not science. But these days, when Tony Blair gets dubbed a “war criminal” and when the US economy is still ailing after the trillions squandered in the Middle East, the questions he asks look like patriotism rather than treachery.